The Singles Jukebox

We’re a bit excited to be back, if you couldn’t tell…

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Crystal Leww: NewJeans is a culmination of Min Hee Jin’s career-long exploration of the many versions of girlhood and what it means. “Super Shy” is girlhood in 2023, which is to say, it’s mostly just vibes — uwu charm lyrics, wispy singing, and a dance made for Tiktok dancing with your homies. It is one of my least favorite NewJeans songs because it’s so non-specific and made for viral meme repeatability than the embarrassingly sincere, sometimes wistful, heart-swooping songs about crushes that I love more from NewJeans but still, non-specific NewJeans still goes off in the club and that’s good enough for me. 
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Every NewJeans song (except for the League of Legends one) is an expertly constructed rush of joy, but “Super Shy” is perhaps the most complete demonstration of why their formula works. The production and songwriting — here handled by Frankie Scoca and Erica De Casier, two key figures in the “dancing alone in your room” space — are great, obviously. But they’re great in a very precise, measured way — every aspect of “Super Shy” plays to the particular strengths of its performers. The skittering drums and dreamy synths come in and out of focus but the vocals are always given center stage, the simplicity of the melody and the unfussiness of the vocal performances making the crush pop lyrics seem at once artificial and deeply real. The appeal of NewJeans — for me at least — is in that strange crux: the fun that they’re having is found exactly in the effort they’re putting in.
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Anna Katrina Lockwood: Probably the slightest of NewJeans’ singles thus far, “Super Shy” is nonetheless a delight. A fizzing little bundle of feelings, this may also be the most distinctively teenage song in NewJeans’ catalog, which is appropriate — they are indeed still teenagers, a truth I feel is still relevant to acknowledge. The push-and-pull of the drum’n’bass underpinnings balance a batch of diaphanous vocals, even more subtle than the vocal performances customary for NewJeans to date. The melodies are simple and relatively consistent, in contrast to the beat, which never settles — it skitters, then thuds, bounces, disappears, phases back in, pulses — always in motion. This is a very brief song, aside from just being a minimalist composition, and its pace goes some way to disguising its length, but not all the way. Given the teenage crush subject matter of “Super Shy”, not to mention NewJeans’ oeuvre as a whole, it feels almost poetically unsatisfying — much like the vast majority of my teenage crushes, there’s a lot of excitement without a complete payoff. Still, a very charming song. 
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Michael Hong: NewJeans watch their crush from afar. And yet it feels close. The group might have positioned themselves at the forefront of K-pop’s current infatuation with club beats, but it’s the low-key nature of their music, the minimalistic simplicity, that’s so captivating. They’re easy: “find a lil’ spot, just sit and talk,” the idea enough to render them giddy. “I’m all nervous cause you’re on my mind all the time,” they hum in a low buzz on the chorus, close to the rapid flutter of the drum ‘n’ bass production — something so thrilling about divulging a crush that it makes you wish you had the courage to voice it to the object of your affection.
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Leah Isobel: On “Super Shy,” NewJeans approach courtship as if it’s a game of hopscotch. There’s no fear of failure as there might be on songwriter Erika de Casier’s version of this concept. Instead there’s just bouncy, breezy momentum, sourced from their confidence and collective joy. As the girls trade off lines it becomes less about the one-to-one specificity of an individual relationship and more about the sweetness of connection itself, how the dances and rituals and games are evidence of the vast history and scope of human love, how each relationship is really the individual, internal universe reminding us of its congruity with the universe outside. We are all both the lover and the loved, all special, all super shy.
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Nortey Dowuona: Erika De Casier gave this team a very well crafted pop record that could never get the push or interest that it could done by a girl group of five. They’re all good singers, but mostly indistinguishable from each other, blurring into a bright lilt that just fades behind the club kicks and only sparks to life on the line, “you don’t even know my name, do ya?” It’s the only stand out lyric, a deeply felt one at least due to the emphasis put on it, and the low bass synths just pops up and down, leaving the drums to move the song forward. They can only get so far, even chopping the vocals behind the only distinct lyric but leaving off with very little impression that the only one to have is that Erika de Casier gave this team a very well crafted pop record that could…
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Oliver Maier: The deft, reserved feel of NewJeans’ second EP has been largely – probably correctly – attributed to Erika de Casier, who maybe relished the opportunity to condense her introverted RnB into sugary pop morsels. “Super Shy” has emerged as the consensus favourite and it’s not hard to see why, between its zeitgesty DnB beat and nuclear earworm hook. It’s not perfect: the verses are a bit incidental and it’s just too short. But the way each member’s voice cartwheels over another’s with every successive chorus loop is magic.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: This is all about the bubbling, butterflies-in-your-stomach space between “I’m super shy” and “Wait a minute while I make you mine.” NewJeans punctuates it with the energy of five Powerpuff Girls on a mission to make their crush notice them. Super shy as in very shy, yes–but more so super shy, as in superheroes of shyness. 
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Andrew Karpan: Cool and iconically bouncy, it’s a song about the ethereal placelessness of a crush, articulating a kind of online-era yearning that places the NewJeans crew in the present as much as any other literally bubbling club-lite touch.
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Kat Stevens: Hits the same buttons (Sweetness and Slaps) as T2’s “Heartbroken”. 
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Ian Mathers: I don’t know what it says, about current trends in pop or about the amount of attention I’ve been paying, that this is a lot closer to the first PinkPantheress album than I would have guessed. Crossing my fingers that I’m not pulling a guy who has only seen Boss Baby about this.
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Alex Ostroff: If you had said even yesterday that I would be rating “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2” higher than “Super Shy” [spoilers!] I would have told you that you were crazy. But, weirdly, PinkPantheress’ chorus has the ebullient bubbling fizzy burst of joy in the vocals that a song about a brand-new crush demands. “Super Shy” is an earworm, and the melody is everything I could possibly want, but NewJeans’ delivery remains at the same level of enthusiasm throughout. I’ve had it on loop for the past 15 minutes and I could absolutely listen to it forever but every time we come back around to the chorus, I can’t help but want the song to EXPLODE into emotions that match the subject. The closest it ever gets is circa “You don’t even know my name, do you?” — the group taking pleasure not in the feeling itself but in the safety of anonymity, the simple pleasure of a crush that makes you feel warm and makes you smile for a passing moment but which you know will never go anywhere, because you won’t even say hi to them. Maybe that was inevitable for a song about being Super Shy, but I want them (and the song) to make that leap.
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Rachel Saywitz: I learned the entirety of the “Super Shy” dance a few months ago at an NYC studio I’ve been frequenting for the past year and a half. For weeks, I practiced waacking on the 7 train and went over complex step sequences in my apartment hallway in the dead of night. I’m not a great dancer, and K-pop choreography is often too advanced for my wobbly body to handle. But I saw something I could maybe replicate with “Super Shy”: in the intricate poise of NewJeans’ movements, the communal joy of their performances, that deceptively simple cheeriness. NewJeans reminds me of the times I used to practice T-ara’s “Roly Poly” shuffle, The Wonder Girls’ “Nobody” sway, Sana of Twice’s “shy shy shy” part from “Cheer Up,” almost every 2NE1 single. I think that’s what makes the song sound so fresh, despite its obvious Jersey Club influences, its soft, plain vocal tones and innocent melodies, a trademark of co-writer Erika de Casier. There’s no larger story that “Super Shy” ties into, no mind bending concept other than the pure thought of crushing on someone. I can embody that. 
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Alfred Soto: You could dance to “Super Shy” — I could dance to “Super Shy” — but the drums ‘n’ bass loop reflects the hum of a person struggling to get outside herself (think Everything But the Girl’s run of mid ’90s albums). The track is almost strong enough to support a conversation about the differences between shyness and introversion. 
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Katherine St Asaph: The drum-and-bass loop is super au courant but also super polite, meant less for the dance floor than one’s interior headspace. And the headspace this song has in mind is curated and chill: no build, no tension, no dramatics, no end to repetition, just safe unchanging reverie. Which is pretty and all, but “Super Shy” is supposed to be a song about a crush, and this is not what a crush feels like. (For me, at least. Must be nice.)
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Jonathan Bradley: A drum-and-bass beat shrunk down small enough to fit inside a locket, a shimmery little keepsake to be tucked away close to your chest and swooned over in lost private moments. Even in the song’s its final moments, when the rhythm picks up with an insistent pulse, the synths retain their smeared pastel sheen. It’s shyness not as coquetry but seclusion: a pretty little song to keep on your nightstand next to a scrapbook and a compact mirror.
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Brad Shoup: I love drum’n’bass because it’s as versatile as potatoes, able to soundtrack both speed-fueled mania and chaste lil crushes. Here, the drums are like home fries: tiny and crisp. “Super Shy” has the kind of massive hook that extends grace to everything around it: the perfunctory, rattled-off rap feels like the rehearsal for a heist. In fact, all the parts where NewJeans seem to be talking to someone else, rather than plotting around them, are less interesting to me. Dozens of listens on, the crush stuff seems like a fig leaf for the joy of devising the perfect scheme.
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Aaron Bergstrom: A song that peeks its head out from around a corner and then disappears down the street before you know what’s happening, chasing a skittering beat that dissolves into finger snaps when the mood strikes. By the time you get to the corner there’s nothing but a shimmer in the air. You spend the rest of the day wondering if there was ever anything there to begin with, but either way you have to admit that everything looks just a little bit brighter.
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Joshua Lu: NewJeans’s brand of easy listening music remains refreshing, but “Super Shy” feels like they’re establishing a formula for the first time. The staccato percussion and the frantic vocals sound like they were imported from “Ditto” and then just laid over a different instrumental, this time some glacial muzak like you’re on hold for the chicest insurance agency of all time. These sounds do combine nicely, but it can’t help but feel undercooked, especially with the short runtime that stops the song from going anywhere truly interesting.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: The genius of NewJeans began with “Ditto,” when they flattened a Baltimore club beat into a wistful portrait of holiday gratitude: less a grandiose fireworks show than sparklers in a backyard. It transcended its modish, bedroom-pop approach to dance music because it wasn’t strictly referential — it toyed with musical conventions to capture the complex emotions of anyone too in their head. “Super Shy” is similar, adopting glossy drum ‘n’ bass as a conduit for crushing hard, fast, and with no plans for action. The secret is in the beat switch to Jersey club-isms, arriving right as “You don’t even know my name, do ya?” provides the most sublime hook of the year. It’s both a question and a proclamation, a sign of yearning and relief: if this crush remains a crush, then I can’t get hurt, right? I heard “Super Shy” in the club the night it came out, but it’s a song ultimately befitting daydreams — the stuttering beat provides all the pleasure you need, no movement needed. Its antiseptic sheen isn’t some utopian future, but the blissfully static present.
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